My Tally Career
I was a founder (and remained so until Novell purchased Tally in 2005) and until
my move to Oregon in 2000 a Software Team Lead at
Tally Systems Corp, a software development company in Lebanon
New Hampshire. As one of the company's
ten founding members I was with Tally since its very humble beginning back in
May of 1990. I came to Tally directly out of college and was incredibly fortunate
to become involved with such a great group of people. I really found the best of
all worlds. A brand new high-tech company, out in the middle of the spectacular
surroundings of northern New England, and ownership of a company along with nine
of the best people I've ever known professionally. What else could I ask for? It's
been an amazing ride to watch Tally grow from the tiny little software company of
11 employees when I started to a midsize company of over 230 people at its height.
As a software developer I worked in the Engineering group at Tally. I developed
mostly in C/C++ using Microsoft Visual C++ and
the Microsoft Foundation Classes. Since Tally was into asset management tools we
did a lot of client/server development. The mainstay database systems we supported
were Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle as well as MSDE on the desktop. The majority of my
development at Tally was on the Windows 9x and Windows 2000/XP platforms.
I've been developing software with MFC dating back to Beta1 of Windows 95, sometime
in late 1993 or early 1994 as I recall. I've been into client/server development
since about 1997.
- The last project I worked on at Tally was a complete rewrite of its flagship product,
TS.Census. We turned it into a full
Win32 enterprise level client/server application. It's an amazingly complex undertaking
and turned out to be a highly challenging project. I managed 5 other developers
working on the GUI side of the application, as well as did some significant development
myself. Two of these 5 developers worked in Albuquerque NM, making the job even
more challenging. We also had teams working on the field applications, the backend
database, middleware application objects and server applications. In all more than
20 engineers were involved in the project.
- Before that I worked on a new application for Tally called Veranda Enterprise
Messaging Reporter. Veranda was a ground breaking product designed
to manage all of a companies messaging systems. Veranda tracked, analyzed and reported
on the myriad of electronic communications activities happening at every level of
an organization. I worked mostly on the GUI and database aspects of Veranda and
I'm pretty proud of how it turned out. Veranda was more than 18 months in the making,
and Version 1.0 was released in June of 1997.
- I've worked on a number of other projects for Tally in the past. Most of
my time has been spent on previous versions of NetCensus (now
known as TS.Census). I designed and implemented the Win32 Collector
back in 1994. This nifty application will scan your
Windows based machine and detail for you a complete list of all currently installed
hardware and software. It has a very modern GUI front end and Tally Systems patented
software recognition algorithm on the backend. This was my first foray into the
world of Win32 and MFC.
- The software recognition algorithm was one of the earliest projects I worked on
for Tally. Myself and 3 other developers were granted a patent for its innovative
technology in 1995.
Patent #5440738.
- Back in the startup days of Tally I was the also Network Administrator
for our Novell Netware based LAN. I ran the network, the telecommunication
systems and managed user workstations all while working on day to day development
of NetCensus (at the time our only product). The Network admin stuff was a lot of
fun (and some not so fun) but Tally had grown considerably, so back in 1994
I passed the network management on to a full time systems administrator. At its
peak Tally Systems had an IT department of 10 employees. My, my, times do change...